A 50-state capital mapping platform
The Low Income Investment Fund could not see its own capital footprint from a policy perspective. Its data sat in separate systems, tracked differently by each department. I led the design and rollout of a national platform that made $30M of investment across fifty states visible in one place.
🧭 Where this sits. Community development finance, at the source. Mapping where capital actually lands, and where it does not, is the question I went on to spend a master’s thesis on at a very different scale: trans-Pacific port corridors instead of American census tracts, the same question about what capital can see.
🧩 Context and challenge
Knowing where and how capital moves is the precondition for shaping investment strategy. Without it, an organization is arguing for its own impact from memory.
The data existed. It was just scattered across systems and departments, each with its own tracking conventions, none of them talking to the others. Reconciling that was the actual work.
And the platform had to serve three audiences at once: leadership wanting the macro view, regional staff managing their own portfolios, and communications turning numbers into stories a funder or a member of Congress would act on. Those are three different products wearing one interface.
🛠 What I did
Led design and implementation end to end, visualizing capital flows across every U.S. market in a single view rather than fifty spreadsheets.
Coordinated inputs from Development, Policy, Communications, and IT, negotiating the definitions each team used before any of it could be joined.
Used the platform to support CDFI advocacy, giving legislators a geographic picture of where the capital lands in their districts.
Worked with communications to convert technical outputs into investor-facing insight and targeted narrative, so the analysis left the analysts’ hands.
Set data entry standards and reporting protocols and trained staff on them, which is the difference between a dashboard and a dashboard that is still accurate a year later.
Layered demographic and geographic data over transaction records, so the map showed not just where money went but what kind of place received it.
⚙️ The stack
📈 Outcomes
An institution cannot direct capital it cannot see.
This was never only a data exercise. Uniting analytics, geography, and narrative built the intelligence backbone for equitable investment, and turned complex financial records into something a regional lender, a chief executive, and a legislator could each act on. Visibility is what makes alignment possible.
